Final Exam
by Cordria
Summary: When Danny has to write a paper for Lancer detailing one of his most traumatic experiences, this is his creation. Caution: extremely depressing and dark. Sequel to 'Pits'.
1. Trauma

_Rated 'T' for violent content. Sequel to 'Pits'._

_Edited/Rewritten 12/2008  
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**Final Exam**  
A Danny Phantom FanFiction by Cordria

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Daniel Fenton  
Casper High Middle Level English  
Final Paper  
7th Period

Topic: Write a paper detailing one of the traumatic experiences of your life. Explain how it affects you today, and how it has changed your life. Use concrete details and try to evoke emotions in the reader.

Trauma

As you all know, five months ago I was captured by a group of ghosts and taken to the ghost zone. The head of the ghost police, Walker, decided that I was more trouble than I was worth and I was sentenced to die. He likes being an executioner. However, the ghost zone is a bit behind the times; they don't execute people like we do today with gas chambers or injections. No – Walker's particular section of the ghost zone is stuck in Roman times. Ghosts are executed Coliseum-style.

I'm not going to bore you with the trip to the pits' holding cells, getting shocked with a device known as the "Plasmius Maximus," or that first night that I spent there in the dark listening to the condemned wail and cry around me. This paper is supposed to be about one experience. I chose my first trip to the pits; the fight that changed my life.

It was early in the morning, which was lucky I found out later. The pits' sand is changed at night and by about mid-morning it's so full of spilled ectoplasm and blood that it's more of a muddy mess than anything else. Walker's goons thought it was funny when they came to drag me away: a puny human going up against one of the strongest pit fighters on record. They gave me a sporting chance, though, when I was given these two sword-like weapons. They were strapped onto my arms and the blades extended above my wrists and about two feet beyond my fingertips. The blades were specially created blades for humans to use in the fights: they deflected ecto-bursts from ghosts and could cut into ghosts even if they were intangible.

The guards yanked me out of my dark cell, forcing my hands behind my back and pushed me down the long ramp to the arena. I later learned that I was put into pit three – the largest of the five pits in the complex. I couldn't see anything at first, the light was so bright it made my eyes water, but when my eyes adjusted to the sudden glare my heart dropped.

The pit was huge, nearly the size of a football field, and covered in a thick layer of sand. Ghost sand is a lot like regular sand, by the way. It gets everywhere, hurts when you get it in your shoes, and turns into a sticky mess when wet. Three fights had already happened and large pools of green blood were soaking into the sand. What was most disturbing about the arena was what surrounded the pit... rows and rows of seats, like a stadium, were filled with hundreds of ghosts – all of them screaming and hollering – betting on who would win the fight: me, weakling Danny Fenton, or Crusher, my opponent. The odds were not in my favor.

Crusher was the reigning champion of the pits. He had survived in the pits for four and a half weeks – only two days shy of the record. He was a large ghost, strong and muscular, with a bad temper and no compassion. It made him a wonderful pit fighter.

I was on my first fight. Almost everybody lost their first fight.

When we reached a point about a third of the way across the pit, the guards shoved me to the ground and took off, wanting to stay away from my blades. I couldn't have used them at that point, I was too stunned and confused about what was going on.

Crusher was a different story entirely. It took seven guards to wrestle him to his starting position. As soon as they let go Crusher swung at them, grabbing a guard with his overly-large fists before they could get away. Overhead, a ghost shield snapped on to prevent the fighters from flying away or hurting the patrons who were betting on the fights.

I still didn't know what to expect from the Pits; nobody had bothered to explain it to me. I didn't know that the second I was released I was allowed to start, I didn't know what I was supposed to do, and I didn't realize the consequences of being in a Pit fight. But I learned quickly. The poor guard that hadn't gotten away fast enough was my first lesson in pit fighting.

Crusher ripped the ghost to shreds with his bare hands, ectoplasmic blood raining down on the sand like a small thunderstorm. As I stood there, stunned by the suddenness of the guard's demise, Crusher looked up and grinned at me. There was no sanity left in those green eyes... Crusher was crazy. I knew it down to the tips of my toes. And I knew I was next.

The huge ghost moved incredible fast - part of it was probably because I was in shock and not thinking right. But Crusher had gotten about fifty feet closer to me before I realized it and started to react.

His fist suddenly glowed green and headed straight for my head. If it would have connected, my head would have been gone right then and my story would have been over. I managed to duck at the last second, my arm snaking out in an attempt to punch him, but I had forgotten about the blades. When I tried to punch him in the stomach, the sharp point of the blade went right into his gut.

I yanked it back out, stammering an apology and backing away. I hadn't meant to hurt him like that- I still didn't understand the point of a pit fight. Crusher looked up at me, his green eyes burning with crazy hatred, one hand holding onto the gash in his stomach. "You," Crusher hissed, his voice deep and echoing.

He came at me again, an ectoblast forming in his hands. I raised my arms in self defense, crossing the blades in front of me. I was lucky, I suppose. Crusher's ectoblast smashed into the blades and was deflected away, slamming into the ground. Pushed backwards a few feet, my arms tingled painfully from the force of the blast.

Crusher followed the blast in, fingers grasping for my neck. Since humans find themselves in the pits nearly as often as ghosts do, Crusher had fought enough humans to know our weak spots. A simple twist of the neck and I would have been finished.

However, I was finally coming out of the shock of the first few attacks and I wasn't quite ready to die at the hands of some crazy ghost. Sidestepping Crusher's attacks. I slammed a blade into his arm as he passed. The blade was a lot sharper than I had thought it would be; it went straight through his arm with little resistance. I suppose it helped that Crusher didn't have any bones for blades to get snagged on. Crusher and his left arm were forever separated.

He staggered to a stop, holding his severed stump of an arm close to his body, ectoplasm dripping down his front. He snarled at me and launched himself again, this time taking to the air. Ghosts can't fly high in the Pits because of the ghost shield, but they can get about twenty-five feet off the ground. Once Crusher was up to his highest point, he dove straight towards me.

There is nothing quite as scary as a six-foot tall, glowing, powerful, and insane ghost hurtling towards you at about a hundred miles an hour - trust me on that. He had his remaining fist out in front of him, fatal amounts of ectoenergy pulsating between his fingers. I thought my reaction was wonderful considering the circumstances: I screamed and panicked.

This happened to be quite helpful in this situation since I dropped into a crouch, my hands coming up to cover my head, the blades attached to my arms sticking up into the air. Crusher, already in a steep dive, was going way too fast for the distance he was traversing and couldn't stop or correct his dive in time. He had been aiming for my stomach. Now that I was crouched, he was aimed for my two blades.

He ran into them, not being able to pull up enough, the two blades carving out long strips of his chest and abdomen. Crusher collapsed to the sand, screaming in pain. Scrambling to my feet, I warily got as far away from the enraged Crusher as possible. I figured he had more tricks up his sleeve – being the reigning champion and all.

I was right. Crusher pushed himself to his feet, seemingly gallons of ectoplasm running down his front, and vanished. It would have been a much bigger deal if Crusher hadn't been bleeding all over the place. His ectoplasm didn't stay invisible once it wasn't connected to him anymore; I could easily trace his path across the pit floor by the thick trail of green blood he was leaving behind.

When Crusher reached me, I was ready. Since I knew where he was, I was able to thrust my two blades forwards in a double-punch and I felt them sink into the flesh of his stomach. What happened next reviles me even to this day. I know that ghosts fix themselves much quicker than humans, and what I did was far from fatal for Crusher, but it still weighs on my mind at times. I had two blades in his abdomen about four inches apart. When I felt his cold skin hit my fists, I ripped my arms apart, tearing the blades through Crusher's sides and, basically, cutting Crusher in half.

Crusher screamed, losing his invisibility instantly. I was showered in a spray of cool ectoplasm as teetered on his feet for a moment, and then collapsed onto the ground, his good arm clutching at his destroyed stomach, unable to breath because of the pain.

I stood there, dripping in my opponent's ectoplasm, staring at him. He wasn't going to get up – not for a very long time. I had won. Looking up, gazing around, I wondered, stupidly, when the medic was going to come help Crusher and let me off the field.

I had never paid attention in history class. I should have. Then what happened wouldn't have surprised me nearly as much.

The crowd was chanting. "Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!" They were screaming and cheering, the ghosts that had placed bets on me shrieking to get on with it so they could go collect their winnings.

I wasn't able to comprehend what they meant. I had won, hadn't I? What more did they want from me?

Walker answered my unspoken question. He had been sitting in his special box for the entire match, but now he was floating over the pit, just on the other side of the ghost shield. "Destroy him, Punk."

"What?" I wasn't being dense; I knew what he meant. I just couldn't understand why.

"Only one of you may survive, Punk: you or him. Choose."

I looked down at Crusher, who was staring up at me with those crazy glowing eyes. "Kill me," Crusher whispered. "I'll just die tomorrow when they throw me back in here. I'm too injured to fight anymore. Kill me so you can live."

There were tears on my cheeks. Crusher wasn't fighting anymore; I wasn't going to hurt him. "Kill him, Punk!" Walker ordered.

"I can't," I whispered, staring down into his eyes. "I can't kill you." I stared at him, sinking down onto my knees by his side, not noticing the cool ectoplasmic mud that I was kneeling in.

Crusher's crazy eyes locked onto mine. "The first kill is always the hardest, kid." I felt his muscular hand grab my limp arm and he maneuvered my arm so the blade was hovering over his throat. "One swift cut and it'll all be over."

"No…"

It's hard to think back on what happened next... I don't think I'll ever be entirely sure what happened. What I do know is that Crusher started my arm moving down and through and that I completed the movement. I'm not sure when it went from Crusher killing himself to me killing him. I will never know if Crusher committed suicide or was murdered.

I do remember the cool gush of ectoplasm as it left Crusher's throat and cascaded over me. He disintegrated in my arms soon after that, leaving nothing behind by a muddy pool of green ectoplasmic blood. The next thing I remember well was being back in my dark cell, crying.

I wish that I could say that the story was over there... that nothing else happened to me. Then there wouldn't be an aftermath - I wouldn't have to think about how I tried to commit suicide or how I had taken the life of something sentient. I wish that those three months of my life could just be erased like words on paper. I wish that the burning memories of being forced to repeat the same scene over and over again wouldn't exist.

I was locked in the pits for two months before I escaped. I fought and killed so many ghosts and humans; every one of them screams in my dreams at night. Most of the time the opponents at least tried to fight. But too many of them, especially the ones that had never been in the Pits before, didn't put up much of a fight. They just dropped to their knees and gave up. In the end, it never mattered what they did since the outcome was always the same: only one can survive. I'm still here – you can figure out what happened to my opponents. By the end my second week trapped in the Pits, I could kill without a second thought. Ghost… human… fighting or on their knees… all died at my hands. By the time I managed to get out, I didn't even care when I killed someone. My mind had just shut down and had given up on being me anymore.

When I look back, it's not the beatings or the small cell or the dark or the lack of food or the fights... none of that makes me wake up at night. It's never the memories of crying in the dark or the thoughts of just finally letting myself die there and then or the screams of the dying that give me nightmares. It's not the haunting and persistent thoughts about what I could have done differently that wake me up.

It's the eyes. The eyes of the condemned, staring up at me, pleading for their lives. For I was their executioner. Not Walker – for all he boasts of loving to be the executioner – me.

And those eyes will be with me for the rest of my life.


	2. Shock

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**Final Exam  
**A Danny Phantom FanFiction by Cordria

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Dear Journal –

It was the day I had been waiting for: final exam day. My stomach twisted slightly and a grin split my face this morning as I thought about how close summer was, and how easy grading final exams this year would be. I'm rather intelligent, if I do say so myself. I came up with a killer plan to keep me from having to read, and then grade, each of them. Most would probably be abysmal, as per usual, full of simple grammar errors and a lack of personality.

My plan? Reading them aloud. Students would come up to the front of the room and read their papers to their peers. This not only kept me from stumbling through a maze of "there, their, and they're"s, but it gave the students work at those annoying public speaking standards the state was constantly shoving down my throat. Of course, all the students _knew_ that they were going to be reading them aloud. They had planned accordingly, or so I hoped.

Life was wonderful for most of the day. We managed to get through nearly half of the papers in each class. I had, without spending any of _my_ time on it, graded each of the papers as they were being read. The topic left something to be desired… but that was something I couldn't help. It was a district exam, with a district-appointed topic, and needed to be graded via district-approved guidelines.

The topic this year was traumatic events. It was depressing at times. I began to wonder, some time around fourth period, if the students were vying for having the most sappy, angst-filled, tear-jerker of a story. Most of it, I'm sure, was made up. Some of it I _know_ was made up. One guy in my fifth period managed to blow up his family twice in his paper – after he had already drowned them.

But then seventh period came. I had been hoping this one student of mine would pull his normal disappearing act and not show up today. I had, actually, been praying for it. The student's name was Daniel Fenton. He had the title of being my most confusing, frustrating, and hopeful student.

There was very little I knew about Danny. His family was supportive and pro-school, but yet he seemed to get no sleep at night. Danny seemed to like school and tried hard, but he skipped out so often. He was also very smart; always ready with a sarcastic quip or pun. I wasn't supposed to know that – he tried really hard to look like a normal, average student – but I eavesdropped on his conversations with his friends. I felt no moral compunction about it. He was usually sitting in my class while he was doing it… while I was trying to teach him something.

However, about three months ago, Danny was kidnapped. His family and friends were frantic, and there was no sign of him anywhere. Everybody had finally given him up for dead when he showed back up. Where he was, nobody really knew and nobody would say. Then again, nobody but Danny knows what he went through. He won't talk to me or the councilor at all. His family and his friends know very little about what happened. His older sister, Jazz, has come to talk to me a few times over the past few weeks about how scared she is. She thinks Danny is bottling things up inside, refusing to talk about it. He refuses to cry, she says, he refuses to feel anything.

Two weeks after he somehow found his way back into our lives, Danny came back to school. It was more for socialization than for schoolwork. All of the teachers knew that. There was only a few weeks of school left anyway. He needed to relearn how to deal with people. But the more people were around him, asking him what was wrong, the more Danny seemed to pull in to himself, trying to lose himself.

I could see signs in Danny every time I looked at him. He was slowly unraveling, his eyes had lost their brilliant shine and he rarely smiled. His ready quips and sarcastic eye-rolls were absent. He seemed to stop caring about everything. He would just sit in that desk, staring straight ahead, not even noticing when Sam or Tucker would drop a note onto his desk. He just stared.

When I had finally found out about this year's topic for final exams, my heart had all but stopped at the thought of Danny Fenton. He was suffering so much still… I'm not completely heartless, no matter what my students may think, so I cheated. Ever so slightly. I gave Danny a different topic to write about. I had hoped he wouldn't notice. Or, if he did, that he either wouldn't care or would be happy about writing something different.

As I started the exams that fateful seventh period, I kept a close eye on Danny. He had his paper, neatly typed, upside down on his desk. He stared out the window then entire time, not seeming to notice the emotionally-charged stories being read aloud. I relaxed, listening more carefully to each of the exams as they were being read.

This class surprised me. They weren't being overly dramatic and weren't focusing on rather petty topics. Well… on the whole. Ms. Sanchez did write a rather eloquent, seven-page tirade about the one day that she and some "loser-Goth" had shown up wearing the same shirt, managing to detail no less than nine reasons why that was one of the most traumatic moments of her life. Mr. Baxter managed to squeak through his exam with a simple description of losing a football game. Even Ms. Manson pulled a decent grade after writing a short story about how her parents were ruining her life.

When it was Danny's turn, he walked up to the front of the room rather slowly. I didn't know what to expect from him. He hadn't spoken up in my class since his return to school. His friends were sharing nervous looks and whispering to each other. From what I could overhear, neither of them knew what Danny's exam was about. That made my heart skip a beat. What could he have written about that he hadn't told those two about?

When he reached the front of the class, Danny turned to look at us. The entire class was dead silent. Nobody knew what Danny was about to say, but most of them were hoping it was about those missing two months. He glanced up at me, smiled ever-so-slightly, and then held up his paper and began to read.

Within seconds, it was completely evident that he had disregarded my changed topic. He was reading his story… a story about what had happened to him during his capture. I should have stopped him the minute I figured it out. But I couldn't. I was transfixed.

I will never forget watching him stand up in front of class and read that paper aloud. His voice was soft, almost raspy with disuse, and he spoke unhurriedly and methodically. His hands never trembled, his feet never shifted uneasily, and his eyes never stopped their deliberate tracking from left to right as he read. He just stood there, reading his paper, seemingly as relaxed and sure of himself as if he was reading a story about dragons and wizards. Nobody in class moved from the moment that Danny started to read. Nobody even breathed, or so it felt.

I listened, captured by the words and the images, as Danny told of a short segment of his ordeal. One fight… described brilliantly through words and emotions. At one point, I'm not sure when, Danny's head came up, his cool, blue eyes gazing out at the class as he recited his paper from memory. I know he was looking at his two friends, who were sitting in the back of the room, hands over their mouths, faces pale. He was confessing a small portion of what he had gone through. Not to the class. Not to me. To _them_. This was the only way he could come up with the courage to do it.

As he was finishing up his fight, I tore my eyes off of him to scan the class. Sam and Tucker looked like they were either going to pass out or leap out of their seats, their eyes wide as they digested the information. Some of the students in the classroom, including Valerie, were wiping tears from their eyes. The football stars had their gazes locked on Danny, shaking their heads slightly, uncomprehending. Even Paulina was staring up at him, her hand over her mouth, listening carefully.

A shiver passed through the room as he wrapped up his paper. He told about all the lives that had been forfeited at his hands, a short overview of everything that he had done to survive. I could feel the pain, the torture, and the anguish that made his voice crack for the first time since he started to read. Finally, he dropped his hands to his sides, his blue eyes tearing up as he was unable to look at the class anymore. His voice dropped from his soft speaking tone to a hoarse whisper as he finished his paper, staring at the floor.

The ending of his paper will haunt my nightmares. Danny, standing utterly defeated in the front of the room, tears dripping down his cheeks, his voice harsh with remembered pain. The awful silence of the room. Danny, speaking that last sentence, barely getting it out. "And those eyes will be with me for the rest of my life." I will never forget that line.

His paper dropped out of his hands, Sam and Tucker flying out of their seats to catch him as he collapsed, sobbing, to the floor. Unable to move, the rest of the class and I watched in disbelief as the two of them led the poor teenager out of the room. For nearly a minute, we were all perfectly still, staring dazedly at the spot where Danny had been standing.

I should have done something. I should have been teacher-ish for Danny and his friends. I know that. But at the time, my brain wasn't working. All I could do was stand there, trying to process what I had just found out. When my mind finally clicked back into gear, the only thing I could think of was the fact that final exams were done for the day. I couldn't focus and nobody else would be able to either. The students were assigned to read for the remainder of the period – I don't even care that few of them did.

I walked to the front of the room, stopped for a second in the place where he had been standing, gazing at the small wet spots on the floor where his tears had fallen. I bent down and picked up his paper. Then, I walked over to my desk and sat down, placing the neatly typed paper in front of me, my mind blank.

I never noticed when the bell rang. I didn't know my students were gone. The next time I looked up, it was well over an hour since the end of school. But I made no move to get up, I did not leave. I just sat there – staring at my most confusing student's paper.

_Now what?_ Danny will probably not be in school tomorrow. He had found a way to open up and share the emotions that were tearing him apart on the inside. He had found a way to get the help he needed. For that, I am glad. But it left me with a million questions.

How do you deal with a student that has been forced to kill? A child that had been beaten, tortured, locked up, and forced to commit atrocities that ran against his very being? What kind of torment had Danny been going through this past month… keeping all of those emotions locked inside of him? Perhaps they had been too much to bear. They were too painful and too overwhelming, so he didn't even want to try.

Unable to answer my questions, sending a silent prayer that Danny wouldn't try and attend school tomorrow, I finally packed up my bag and stood up to leave. As I was pushing my chair in, my clipboard was jostled off of its pile of papers and clattered to the floor. I picked it up, a new question picking at my mind as I stared down at the half-finished final evaluation clipped to it.

How was I going to grade this particular student's work? Hesitating, I picked up Danny's paper, staring down at the title page. I shook my head, laughing slightly. Of all the problems in the world, this was rather trivial. That's my lot in life, I suppose. Danny would need to deal with his problems on his own. Of course, I would be there for him no matter what – and I would make sure he knew that. But I needed to deal with my problems… and this was one of them.

I bit my lip. This paper didn't deserve a grade. Not one that I could give. You cannot give a paper that he had obviously poured his heart and soul in to something as simple as a grade. For Danny, it had been his release, his plea for help, and his first step towards controlling his future and making a better life for himself. It was more than a paper; it was more than simple words on a page.

I very carefully set my student's work down on my desk. I would send it home with Jazz next time I saw her. I wasn't supposed to return these exams – but this was not something I could keep.

Then, without a second thought, I pulled Danny's half-finished evaluation off of the clipboard, crinkled it up into a tiny ball, and tossed it into the trash.

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_I still do not own Danny Phantom._

_I managed to write an entire Lancer-based chapter without using one book-related comment. Interesting._

_Write me a review, please. It helps me know what you are interested in reading. :-)_

_--Cori_


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